The rapidly growing market for portable electronic devices, e.g. cellular phones, laptop computers, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), is an integral facet of modern life. The multitude of portable devices represents one of the largest potential market opportunities for next generation integrated circuit devices. These devices have unique attributes that have significant impacts on manufacturing integration, in that they must be generally small, lightweight, and rich in functionality and they must be produced in high volumes at relatively low cost.
Manufacturing and designing integrated circuit devices is at the very core of next generation electronics insertion strategies outlined in road maps for development of next generation products. Future electronic systems can be more intelligent, have higher density, use less power, operate at higher speed, and can include mixed technology devices and assembly structures at lower cost than today.
There have been many approaches to addressing the advanced design and manufacturing requirements of integrated circuit devices and portable electronics with successive generations of semiconductors. The limitations and issues with current testing and programming platforms include increasing longevity, durability, operational time, and cost.
As these systems evolve to incorporate more components with varied environmental needs, the pressure to push the technological envelope becomes increasingly challenging. More significantly, with the ever-increasing complexity, the potential risk of error increases greatly during manufacture.
In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Thus, a need remains for more robust and capable socket systems and methods for manufacture. Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.